Sustainable Development and Society - GSA

Sustainable Development and Society
Measuring and Reporting
Sustainability Principles
From “Beyond the Triple Bottom Line: Measuring and Reporting on Sustainability,”
Occasional Paper, Victorian Auditor-General's Office, Melbourne, June 2004.
Adopting the sustainability principles
impacts on all aspects of an
organisation’s business, from
planning to operations to governance
arrangements…
First and foremost, applying the
sustainability principles means going
beyond traditional financial reporting to
measure and report on at least the
environmental, social and economic
dimensions of performance . . . However, as
critics of these models have pointed out,
they use a reductionist approach to
measuring and reporting on sustainability.
That is, they:
• Break sustainability down into three or
more pillars
• Break each pillar down into a series of
topics
• Break each topic down to a series of
performance indicators
• Measure each indicator separately
• Use ‘scientific approaches’ to measure
each indicator.
The reductionist approach is inconsistent
with the concept of sustainability, and its
principles, for two main reasons. Firstly,
sustainability is not a single thing. It is
multidimensional… Secondly, sustainability
is a vision of wholeness. Breaking it down
into disconnected parts and then studying
the parts individually will not help us
understand the relationships between the
parts that make up the whole. Instead,
taking the reductionist approach can lead
us to oversimplify the complex nature of
sustainability . . .
Applying sustainability principles has the
potential to improve performance, in the
short and long terms. For this reason,
governments in many countries have
adopted sustainability policies, resulting in
an explosion of sustainability initiatives…
Applying these principles is not a simple
task. The interrelated nature of
sustainability complicates all aspects of
organisational life, from planning to
operations to measurement and reporting…
The currently available measurement and
reporting tools apply some of the principles
well. However, approaches that capture the
relationships between the pillars are still
evolving. Approaches to measuring and
reporting on intergenerational equity are
even more rudimentary.
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